Sigurd Leeder

Sigurd Leeder

Sigurd Leeder (born August 14, 1902 in Hamburg ; † June 20, 1981 in Herisau , actually Carl Eduard Wilhelm Leder) was a German dancer, choreographer and dance teacher who worked with Kurt Jooss at the Folkwang School in Essen and in Dartington Hall in Devon , England developed the Jooss-Leeder method and instrumental in the development and dissemination of kinetography was involved Laban. From 1964 until his death he led the Sigurd Leeder School of Dance in Herisau.

biography

1902-1923

Sigurd Leeder was born in Hamburg into a non-artistic environment. As a child he discovered his talent for telling stories through movement by playing roles for a deaf-mute playmate. As a talented draftsman, he completed a graphic design course at the Hamburg School of Applied Arts. There he inspired his classmates with improvisation lessons and designed their first dance solos. The 18-year-old put inner movement and pictorial ideas into dance movement, so he can be considered an exemplary representative of expressionistic expressive dance. He later vehemently rejected this concept of epoch and style. He was convinced that every form of dance had its specific expression and preferred the term Central European Dance for his dance work.

As a dancer, Leeder was self-taught ; he refused to work in his father's lithography business and was engaged as an actor and dancer at the Hamburger Kammerspiele . From 1921 he performed with his own choreographies, later he danced in Jutta von Collandes troupe in 1922/23.

1924-1947

In 1924 the encounter with Kurt Jooss led to a long lasting artistic and short private partnership. They got together, went on tour with the program “Two Dancers” and appeared in duets such as “Bizarrer Second Dance”. As a soloist and teacher, Leeder accompanied Jooss to Münster and in 1927 as a subject teacher and co-director at the Folkwang School in Essen. Laban's student Jooss introduced Leeder to the ideas of Rudolf von Laban . Together the two developed a professional training method based on his theories on choreography and eukinetics . The cinetography Laban, which Leeder helped to refine and disseminate , also had an important place in the curriculum . In addition to teaching, he danced in the works of Jooss with the Folkwang Tanzbühne Essen and later with the Ballets Jooss.

In the spring of 1934, Leeder emigrated with a sizeable crowd from Essen to Dartington Hall in Devon , England . Until 1939 he taught there at the Jooss-Leeder-School of Dance and directed the associated Dance Theater Studio. The choreography “Danse Macabre” was created in the 1935 summer course. Famous graduates were Hans Züllig , Ann Hutchinson, Birgit Cullberg , Simone Michelle, Tim Rubidge and Jeanne Brabant ... The vocational training as well as the vacation and further training courses always included the subject of notation . The dance script served to put his choreographies and dance studies into writing. Analogous to etudes in music lessons, Leeder created dance studies that contain more than enchainements. They are structured in a complex manner, combine two or more heterogeneous movement elements and thematize aspects and possible processes of movement sequences with regard to changes in meaning. In this way they contextualize movement material and, as a whole, form a practical pedagogy of dance composition.

The outbreak of World War II meant the school was closed. Leeder was interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien and released in 1941. Jooss was no longer suspected of espionage either. The re-establishment of the Jooss-Leeder-Dance Studio took place in Cambridge in 1941 . From 1942 the Ballets Jooss appeared again - with Jooss, Leeder, Hans Züllig, Rolf Alexander, Noëlle de Mosa, Ulla Söderbaum, Maja Kübler, Peter Wright and other students as dancers. The 1932 award-winning choreography “The Green Table” by Jooss, which since its premiere in Paris until 1947, was performed more than 3000 times, remained at the center of the repertoire. For example, “Sailor's Fancy” was shown by Leeder's choreographies. In 1947 Jooss disbanded his troop and returned to the Folkwang School in Essen .

1947-1981

After the last American tour and shortly before the breakup of the Ballets Jooss, Leeder separated from Jooss after 23 years of collaboration and founded his own Sigurd Leeder School of Dance and the Sigurd Leeder Studio Group in London in 1947 . His influence on modern dance in London at the time was great, as in post-war England his school alone offered three years of full-time training as a modern dancer. Actors, movie stars and opera singers also came. Leeder was in demand in the British theater scene. An important student was Jean Cébron .

From 1950 he traveled to Belgium , Sweden and Switzerland as a popular guest teacher for further education and holiday courses . Between 1953 and 1957 he taught four times at the summer courses of the Swiss Professional Association for Dance and Gymnastics in Zurich's Rigiblick.

In 1960, Leeder accepted an invitation from the University of Santiago de Chile and headed the dance department there for four years.

In 1964 he returned to Europe and made Grete Müller's preparatory school in Herisau, Switzerland, a secondary school. At the Sigurd Leeder School of Dance in Herisau, the ingenious pedagogue continued to convey his tried and tested training method to an international group of students, creating choreographies such as “Akzente”, “Mobile”, “Die Pforte”. His lessons remained comprehensive with the subjects of dance technique, choreography , eukinetics , improvisation, dance notation and the stage subjects costume and mask production, stage design and lighting, poster and program design. In the last years of his life he worked on his notations in addition to teaching. He edited some of them, annotated them and published them - not without self-designed covers.

Leeder died in the middle of work on June 20, 1981 in Herisau.

Works (selection)

Sigurd Leeder's "Mobile" danced by Ueli Kohler, 1975

Choreographies

• Dance Without Music (1920)
• Mask Dance (1924)
• Night Piece (1926)
• Asian melody (1926)
• The Faithful Farmer (1933)
• Dance Macabre (1935)
• Donna Clara (1937)
• Sailor's Fancy (1943)
• The Captive Bird (Toccata) (1949)
• Bolero (1950)
• Nocturne (1952)
• Figura Tragica (1952)
• Rübezahl (1953)
• Tropical Mood (1972)
• Of a strange kind I-IV (1972-74)
• Accents (1972)
• Mobile (1975)
• The Gate (Alkane) (1977)

Pedagogical dance studies

• 1928–1976 about choreography, eukinetics and dance technique

Notations

Manuscripts

• Night piece (in its own notation after Rudolf von Laban: Choreography I, Jena 1926)
• The Faithful Farmer (1933)
• Bolero (1950)
• 1928–1980 over 2000 pages of notations (choreographies and dance studies)

Publications

• Choreutics study based on the Icosahedron. Music by Johannes Brahms . 1976
• The gate. (The Gate) A Group Dance for 14 People. Music by Alkan. Herisau 1978
• Danse Macabre . A group dance for 18 people. Music by C. Saint-Saëns . Herisau 1980 (BR 269)
• Homogeneous tension 69. Music by Matheson. 1969
• Mobile. A solo dance. Music by Henrico Albicastro . Herisau
• Portuguese. Music by John Colman. 1979
• Space diagonals 72. Music by Dohnany. 1973
• Swing study 65. Music by Pina Harding. 1965
• Tango 34. Music by John Colman. 1979
• Tropical mood . A group dance for 5 girls. Herisau

Film recordings

Danse Macabre. 1935

Literature (selection)

Monographs

• Jane Winearls: Modern Dance. The Jooss-Leeder-Method. London 1958.
• Grete Müller (Ed.): Sigurd Leeder. Dancer, educator and choreographer. Life and work. Self-published, Herisau 2001, ISBN 3-85882-400-3 .
• Grete Müller (Ed.): Sigurd Leeder. The dancer as a draftsman. K. Kieser, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-935456-00-X .
• Ann Hutchinson Guest: A selection from the Sigurd Leeder heritage. The Noverre Press, Hampshire 2017, ISBN 978-1-906830-81-6 .

Essays

• Barbara Passow: Jooss Leeder technology . In: Tanzplan Deutschland, Ingo Diehl, Frederike Lampert (Ed.): Tanztechniken 2010 . Henschel, Leipzig 2nd edition 2011, ISBN 978-3-89487-412-4 , pp. 60-132.
• Stephan Brinkmann: The Jooss-Leeder-Method and its history. In: Stephan Brinkmann: Remember movement. Forms of memory in dance (= Gabriele Brandstetter, Gabriele Klein [Hrsg.]: TanzScripte. Volume 26). Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2013, ISBN 978-3-8376-2214-0 , pp. 227-293.
• Ann Hutchinson Guest: Leeder Pictures for the Dance. The teaching method of Sigurd Leeder In: ballett international. Ballett-Bühnen-Verlag, Cologne, 10 (1985), pp. 15-21.
• Grete Müller: Demonstration about the Sigurd-Leeder method . In: Society for Dance Research eV (ed.): Dance Research Yearbook . Volume 5, Wilhelmshaven: Noetzel 1994, pp. 109-114.
• Marianne Forster: 50 years of the Sigurd Leeder School of Dance. A portrait of the school and its founder and the anniversary celebration in Herisau. In: German Professional Association for Dance Education (Hrsg.): BALLET INTERN. German Professional Association for Dance Education, Essen 1/1998, ISSN  1864-1172 , pp. 26–28.
• Ursula Pellaton: The inner motivation is of vital importance. For Sigurd Leeder's 100th birthday. In: Mary Wigman Society (ed.): Tanzdrama . K. Kieser, Munich, 5 (2002), ISSN  0932-8688 , pp. 2-9.

Web links

• Sigurd Leeder's estate and donation can be viewed in the Swiss dance archive
• Swiss dance archive videos: Sigurd Leeder
• Sigurd Leeder School of Dance
• Entry by Sigurd Leeder in the Swiss Theater Lexicon
• Claudia Fleischle-Braun: Sigurd Leeder's dance pedagogical concept and its transnational dissemination on the website of the German Dance Archive Cologne .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sigurd Leeder: How and when did I actually get into dancing. In: Grete Müller (Ed.): Sigurd Leeder. Dancer, educator and choreographer. Life and work . Self-published, Herisau 2001, ISBN 3-85882-400-3 , p. 11 .
2. ↑ Leeder's thoughts on modern dance . In: Grete Müller (Ed.): Sigurd Leeder, dancer, pedagogue and choreographer. Life and work . Self-published, Herisau 2001, ISBN 3-85882-400-3 , p. 12-14 (lecture in London 1952).
3. ↑ Patricia Stöckemann: Something completely new has to be created now. Kurt Jooss and the dance theater . Kieser, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-935456-02-6 , pp. 52-326 .
4. ^ Rudolf von Laban The Mastery of Movement and Choreutics were written earlier, but only published in 1950 and 1966.
5. ^ Valerie Preston-Dunlop: Rudolf Laban. An Extraordinary Life . Dance Books, London 1998, ISBN 1-85273-060-9 , pp. 131 .
6. ^ John Hodgson, Valerie Preston-Dunlop: Rudolf Laban. An Introduction to His Work & Influence . Northcote House, Plymouth 1990, ISBN 0-7463-0584-2 , pp. 23 .
7. ↑ Patricia Stöckemann: Something completely new has to be created now. Kurt Jooss and the dance theater . Kieser, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-935456-02-6 , pp. 291-316 .
8. ↑ Stephan Brinkmann: In the footsteps of Kurt Jooss and Sigurd Leeder and conclusion . In: Stephan Brinkmann (Ed.): Remember movement. Forms of memory in dance (= Gabriele Brandstetter, Gabriele Klein [Hrsg.]: TanzScripte . Band 26 ). Transript Verlag, Bielefeld 2013, ISBN 978-3-8376-2214-0 , p. 286-293 .
9. ^ Adriana Ruggiero: Sigurd Leeder article . In: International Dictionary of Modern Dance . St. James Press, Detroit 1998, ISBN 1-55862-359-0 , pp. 461-462 .
10. ↑ Jean Cébron. (No longer available online.) In: www.pact-zollverein.de/archiv/kuenstler/jean-cebron. Archived from the original on May 30, 2017 ; Retrieved April 24, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
11. ↑ Sabine Gisiger, Sandra Jorio, Ursula Kasics (Ed.): Movements. Dance and gymnastics in Switzerland 1939-1989 . Documentation on the 50th anniversary of the Swiss Professional Association for Dance and Gymnastics (SBTG). Chronos-Verlag, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-905278-50-2 , p. 67-68 and pp. 149-153 .